This past weekend RVA Game Jams hosted a real-world meetup for Ludum Dare 26! The ludum dare comes in two flavors, a 48-hour solo competition and a 72-hour group based game jam. We had participants in both flavors at the 804RVA jam location, and saw some great concepts get put into action!

I decided to use the Ludum Dare compo to learn some new features of Unity that I had not previously worked with. One feature I had not yet used was the physics joint system. I expected it to be a challenge, but Unity surprised me with its power once again. Adding a hinge joint was as simple as adding the component to a game object and then pointing the joint at the game object it was attached to; two clicks! In order to get the functionality I was going for I had to set a few variables, mostly limiting the angles of the joint.

The theme for this Ludum Dare was “minimalism”. A nice theme that can be interpreted a lot of different ways. The game design I came up with was a simple snake-style game which differs from the traditional game by not constraining movement to 90 degree turns. Additionally, the pellets that the snake consumes to increase its size are vulnerable to physics effects, resulting in the snake’s tail moving the pellets around. Initially, I thought I might use a “convoy” of vehicles to represent the snake, but eventually settled into a chinese dragon theme, resulting in the title of “Dragenvoy”.

I had a lot of fun making this game (I think I played it as much as I worked on it while developing). The community at RVA game jams is very talented and produced some great results for this game jam.

Below is a link to the game, leave a comment with your high score and any feedback!